Wireless computing technologies provide untethered access to the Internet and other networks. One of the most critical technologies for wireless networking (or Wi-Fi) is the IEEE 802.11 family of protocols promulgated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Currently, the protocols are widely adopted in stations such as laptop computers, tablet computers, smart phones, and network appliances.
Stations complying with standards such as IEEE 802.11 have control over how a connection to wireless network is made. Namely, a station selects an access point among a number of access points that have sent out beacons advertising a presence. The beacon includes a BSSID (Basic Service Set Identifier) as an identifier of the access point. In turn, the station transmits data packets which include the BSSID of the intended access point. Unintended access points receiving a transmission merely ignore the data packets.
Problematically, stations also inherently have control over uplink accesses to wireless networks. Uplink access is necessary for sending data to the wireless network from a station, such as URL requests, queries, control information, and the like. Although an access point can control an amount of data over downlink accesses, there is no control built into the protocol for uplink accesses of, for example, aggressive stations. Consequentially, a station can consume more than a fair amount of bandwidth on a network, or overburden a processing load of network components. This problem is exasperated for public hot spots or large companies that have a large amount of stations connected at the same time. For example, the number of collisions can degrade channel quality when too many stations uplink at the same time.
One technique to address this issue is to download customized software to a station. But reconfiguration of stations running on a station is not always desirable. For instance, guests connecting to a public hot spot for only one time would be burdened with the process of downloading and installing a client. Furthermore, many computer users are weary about malicious applications downloaded from the Internet.
Another technique to address this issue, known as virtual port, assigns a BSSID to each station in order to set uplink parameters. Unfortunately, the overhead of virtual port is prohibitive for scaling because regular beacons are sent out for each BSSID to maintain synchronization with an access point. In larger deployments, the occurrence of still beacons increase as the requirement for individual beacons required over each period cannot be met. Consequentially, degradation of station connectivity can occur at, for instance, when 20 or more wireless stations are connected to the access point.
What is needed is a robust technique to provide airtime fairness and uplink access control for connected stations. Further, the uplink access control should be extendable to a per-station level. Finally, the technique should not require reconfiguration of a standard IEEE 802.11 station.